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I think that Huffington Post article has some good points about how obesity should be addressed on a personal level and how the American medical system will never be able to actually address this issue. But I don't think they approach the weight/health problem very well. They mention that weight isn't inherently tied to health because 1/3 to 3/4 of obese patients may show no signs of high cholesterol or insulin resistance. However, obesity is like smoking in that you could take a cross section of smokers and find that a large portion of them are healthy. The real issue is that being obese or smoking are drastically increasing the odds of negative medical outcomes in the future.

But it IS a medical issue for many people. Of course people can chose what they want to do with their bodies and disparaging them doesn't work. However many people are trying to "overcorrect" by pretending that abnormal weight is actually good for you or that nothing you ever try will help you deal with it and I really don't think it is helpful at all. My cousin has struggled with obesity for a long time, at some point he had to be operated because it was damaging his body. He is doing better than back then now but it's really not that great, and his learning difficulties plus a mostly unhelpful family in that regard are making it harder. I don't think this kind of approach is necessarily helpful.

I've been fat basically all my life.

Around kindergarten or so my parents realized that it wasn't baby fat any more and that maybe, just maybe me opening the pantry lock on multiple occasions and using a chair to reach the peanut butter jar and shove as much of it into my mouth without a drink until I got caught might be a warning sign. But rather than investigate for any nutrient deficiencies or mental issues their autistic child was going through they decided to start putting me on trend diets. I'm assuming they felt a pang of guilt making a small child go on adult diets, so they would also go on the same diets. Instead of motivating me it would just make me feel worthless whenever the diets worked on them but not me. I remember a few months where they would have me pack a can of slimfast for lunch and then by the time I got home I'd be starving and scarf down whatever was in the pantry. The diets would change about every year or so, and so I ended up having weight fluctuations while my overall weight increased. I remember my mom crying one day about my weight being 150 pounds before I even reached middle school and then yelling "YOU WANT TO LOSE WEIGHT, DON'T YOU?" and telling her that her and dad were the ones who wanted me to lose weight. They'd guilt me about being fat every chance they got. The only thing that worked in my childhood wasn't diets but being forced to go to a gym and lift weights for half a year. Muscle really does help burn weight. But then I hit high school and because grades always come first we all forgot about the gym and the weight bounced back. Eventually I was able to drive my own car in high school and that's when my weight fucking skyrocketed.

So I'm an adult now and I've realized that I have both a physical and mental need to over eat. I've used food as a coping mechanism since I was a toddler, and that only increased as I continued to push down my autistic self and replace it with someone that can pass as just a little odd. I know that I need therapy, but I also know that I need to keep my finances in check and that therapy might end up being as expensive as a second car even with health insurance because I live in the fucking U.S.A. and with covid I can't even work overtime to put extra money into savings. I feel like I'm so close to getting professional help and yet part of me always pulls my arm back and says "Next year might be even worse financially, yet you already know what it's like to be fat. You're still young, you can gamble on your health a little longer. Bad finances could fuck over your credit score and ability to rent for years to come." Like FUCK, why do I have to pick???

Guess I'll just continue to cope until I can afford professional help.

:amerikkka: :amerikkka: :amerikkka:

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Thanks good sharing those links, comrade, I'd known a bit about set points, capitalism's impact, and fatphobia but never did any in depth reading on the subjects.

Reading about people insisting that fat people just needing better discipline and impulse control really resonated with me since I got used to hearing that about other things before I got diagnosed with ADHD.

Other people's weights have never really been on my mind but knowing the actual research behind why some people are fat and how most of the health implications of being fat are societally driven is gonna help me discuss it with people who are being fatphobic rather than just telling them to knock it off

I just finished reading that second article you listed and this quote has me just baffled:

In 1997, a panel of nine medical experts tapped by the National Institutes of Health voted to lower the BMI cutoff for overweight from 27 (28 for men) to 25. So, overnight, millions of Americans became overweight thanks to the NIH. The panel argued that the change brought BMI cutoffs into line with World Health Organization Criteria and that a ‘round’ number like 25 would be easier for people to remember. What they didn’t say, because they didn’t have to, is that lowering BMI cutoffs put more people into the overweight and obese categories, which in turn made more people eligible for treatment. More patients to treat means new markets and more money to be made from doctors and hospitals to pharmaceutical companies and yes, researchers.

Lowering the BMI so that it would be easier for people to remember? Not taking into account the implications, wtf?

And this is pretty big too IMO:

Weight cycling has been associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular problems and higher mortality from all causes. Indeed some research indicates that weight cycling can account for all of the excess mortality risks for certain diseases associated with being in a larger body. One large-scale, long-term study followed more than 3,100 people over thirty-two years; it found weight cycling correlated with an increased risk of death from all causes and an increased risk of developing coronary heart disease, even after controlling for BMI and other potentially confounding factors such as preexisting illness and smoking. Not only that, but the relative risks attributable to weight cycling were comparable to the risks that typically get blamed on being in a larger body — suggesting that if all studies were to control for weight cycling, any excess risk from so-called ‘overweight’ or ‘obesity’ might disappear… Until all research can control for weight cycling and weight stigma, we can’t say that being at the higher end of the BMI spectrum causes any health conditions — even if higher weights are associated with these health conditions.

I very much like his final sentences:

As Virgie Tovar says about dieting in You Have the Right to Remain Fat, “You cannot learn to love yourself by walking a path paved by self-hatred.” This process is necessary for us to be able to liberate ourselves, and those who are most marginalized. There is no liberation without mutual liberation, so let’s all get fucking free.

Thanks for posting these resources because it made me realize that I too have internalized a lot of these thought patterns, which I hadn't recognized before or didn't see as negative, so to speak.
And that I still have a lot of learning to do on this topic, seems like a really cornerstone issue on the path towards liberation too, now that I'm thinking about it.

Gonna read the others you listed as well to see some other perspectives as well, not just the one I can relate the easiest to.
Sorry if this is a bit disjointed lol

So, thanks again!

:fidel-salute:

But my mother’s story, like Sam’s, like everyone’s, didn’t have to turn out like this. For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost

Oh wow, that's crazy. When I lost >100 lbs over the course of a year doing keto and carefully tracking my caloric intake (with very little exercise) it must have been the fat fairy that was actually making me lose weight.

I was never morbid, but I was obese for almost 20 years. I was shamed, it made me hate myself more which led to stress eating.

It wasn't until I lost my health insurance that I became hyper health focused to help prevent medical bankruptcy, even if it was only marginally improved. Gave up meat and dairy, work out regularly, and follow nutritional guidelines. The US healthcare system scares the shit out of me and I know it's only delaying the inevitable but its worth it to me. Definitely helped my sex life too, until last year...but fear and pleasure will only take you so far down the road.

One day I looked into the mirror and saw fat, I gave my torso a squeeze and two things came into my mind that cemented my resolve: My consumption habits deprived food from the hungry while destroying myself and I need to plan and commit to my own physical/mental transformation (like going from an agricultural to industrial civilization) if I was ever going to commit to advocating societal change of AmeriKKKa.

It worked for me, not because of the Darwinist healthcare system or fat shaming, but because I finally learned to attach positive health habits to my moral desires.

Fatphobia is so fucking harmful, the first time I ever felt happy about my body was at 20 when I met another transfem enby who was fat like me and I thought that not only did they look super hot but they also looked like me, which was like a revelation. Now I feel genuinely happy about my body and have decided that I flat out just look hotter fat than I would if I lost a bunch of weight, fuck all the concern trolling about health theres so much unhealthy shit already thats both 100% accepted and doesnt make me look hot at the same time so why care about it here.

Fuck yeah, i was waiting for this discourse to take off. Here's another article saying BMI is both useless AND racist and why we shouldn't use it to measure health

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bmi-scale-racist-health_l_5f15a8a8c5b6d14c336a43b0

“It is racist, and also sexist, to use mostly white men within your study population and then try to extrapolate that and create norms and expectations for women and people of color,” Strings told HuffPost. “They have not been included in the initial clinical analyses, and therefore their actual health outcomes cannot be determined by these findings.”

In short, the way BMI is being used is unscientific because of its origins and the homogenous population it was created from.

thin bodies of northern and western Europeans were upheld as the ideal, while the often larger bodies of eastern and southern Europeans, as well as Africans, were considered signs of their inferiority. All of this was before we really knew anything about the (still blurry and confounding) relationship between weight and health. The modern BMI and its categories ― underweight, normal, overweight and obese ― have inherited much of that racism.

Many males with anorexia nervosa go undiagnosed because they are technically within the “normal” BMI category, Gaudiani said. The same thing happens to people at higher weights, who often don’t get screened for eating disorders despite things like significant recent weight loss, symptoms of malnutrition or reported eating disorder behaviors.

This actually happened to me, to some degree. I went into the doctor for something else after unintentionally losing around 25 lbs in a year due to not eating because of anxiety. My body felt like shit, I was constantly dizzy and tired. My face was sunken. i could feel my bones and see all my ribs. It literally hurt to sit because my ass and thighs were losing padding and i just felt my bones. Some days, i could eat nothing. On my good days, i was able to eat perhaps half a regular meal and a snack. I felt and looked sick.

The doctors said nothing, because i still barely in the "healthy" BMI range (i got big xaddy milkers which throw the scale off. No matter how emaciated i became, the tit persists), in fact they didn't even ask about my weight loss, it was just assumed to be good/intentional. Conversely, years ago i was a bit heavier and barely dipped over to the "overweight" range for BMI. I went to see the doctor for a refill of birth control and immediately my doctor asked "if i was happy at this weight" and adopted a judgemental tone when she asked it. She also implied i didn't need antidepressants if i "took care of myself better" and pressured me to go off them, which i did, which gave me terrible withdrawals and still didn't fix my depression, anxiety, or PTSD. My next doctor put me back on them after i tested high on the depression scale lol

On the flip side, uncle who was in the military was actually forced to lose weight at some point because his BMI was too high - but he was built out of pure muscle and had a healthily low fat %. He had to stop working out and let muscle atrophy to be able to fit their arbitrary weight range.

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